Review of Moneyball (2011) by Omar L — 20 Jun 2014

I consider myself a futurist and a pragmatist, so it's no wonder that I enjoyed the spirit of this movie. I only had two problems with the movie: 1) in a movie about baseball, there was not enough of it and 2) the ending of the movie made it seem like the entire film was about the Red Sox's legendary breaking of the Bambino's Curse and not about the Athletics. I know if I was an A's fan, I'd feel pretty shortchanged about that ending.

Pitt and Hill do an excellent job in this movie, but the stoic and subdued performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman is actually the most memorable. There was a resignation in his performance that spoke volumes without any change in the tone of voice. It showed how heart had been substituted by cold logic, and the heartlessness displayed throughout the entire movie made it disconcerting as players and games became nothing more than numbers and commodities to be traded like so many grade school lunches. By distilling the game to a sequence of stats and numbers, the joy of the game disappeared, which made the lone game featured that much more powerful.